The fax was sent in 2007. The case was finally dropped a few months back. This had been years in the making. This is the kind of garbage that business owners have to deal with. A friend of mine owns a large construction company. They were slow and had to lay off half their workforce in the years since the housing slowdown. The owner hasn't taken a paycheck more then a year as they fight to keep their business afloat. He had 70 employees at one point and is down to 30. Well a few of the former employees are suing for wrongful termination. This guy is literally keeping a business open because he wants to help out the guys that have been working for him for 20-25 years and he is getting sued personally for laying off some of his workforce. It is crazy. He will win the suit but the legal expenses will force him to shut down the business regardless. The system needs to be changed. It simply adds to the risks associated with owning a business. It takes away the motivation to become an entrepreneur.

Baruch College economics professor June O’Neill, in an article published in 2003, shows that when data on demographics, education, scores on the Armed Forces Qualification Test, work experience, child-related factors, and percent female in the occupation are analyzed, the wage ratio becomes 97.5 percent, an insignificant difference.

In another study, Professors Marianne Bertrand of the University of Chicago and Kevin Hallock of Cornell University found almost no difference in the pay of male and female top corporate executives when accounting for size of firm, position in the company, age, seniority, and experience.

Lower pay can reflect decisions—by men and women–about field of study, occupation, and time in the workforce. Those who don’t finish high school earn less. College graduates who major in humanities rather than the sciences have lower incomes. More women than men choose humanities majors.

Employers pay workers who have taken time out of the work force less than those with more experience on the job, and many women work fewer hours for family reasons. When women choose jobs that allow more flexibility and less travel in order to accommodate family, they find that they end up earning less.

Yet a choice of more time out of the workforce with less money rather than more time in the workforce with more income is not a social problem. A society that gives men and women these choices, as does ours, is something to applaud.

Although documented cases of discrimination exist, and are rightly settled in the courts, when all the factors behind the pay numbers are calculated, men and women earn about the same.

We don't need the EPA anyway because big corporations will police themselves. As an example, without the fear of government oversight these companies will do the right thing when it comes to waste cleanup/management and spend the extra money to dispose of toxic waste properly. And those shareholders will understand why they are receiving less profit because it is the right thing to do.

And the next thing that needs to be done is major tort reform so we can make it almost impossible to sue. Those pesky citizens are looking for a quick buck because there happens to a little arsenic in the drinking water

We need the EPA because corporations can only sometimes be trusted. But we also need common sense rules and and regulators doing their jobs, not sitting in their offices jerking it to p0rn, like during the BP oil spill.